Subgroups

With subgroups (aka nested groups or hierarchical groups) you can have
up to 20 levels of nested groups, which among other things can help you to:

Separate internal / external organizations. Since every group
can have its own visibility level, you are able to host groups for different
purposes under the same umbrella.

Organize large projects. For large projects, subgroups makes it
potentially easier to separate permissions on parts of the source code.

Make it easier to manage people and control visibility. Give people
different permissions depending on their group membership.

Database Requirements

Nested groups are only supported when you use PostgreSQL. Supporting nested
groups on MySQL in an efficient way is not possible due to MySQL's limitations.
See the following links for more information:

Overview

A group can have many subgroups inside it, and at the same time a group can have
only 1 parent group. It resembles a directory behavior or a nested items list:

Group 1

Group 1.1

Group 1.2

Group 1.2.1

Group 1.2.2

Group 1.2.2.1

In a real world example, imagine maintaining a GNU/Linux distribution with the
first group being the name of the distro and subsequent groups split like:

Organization Group - GNU/Linux distro

Category Subgroup - Packages

(project) Package01

(project) Package02

Category Subgroup - Software

(project) Core

(project) CLI

(project) Android app

(project) iOS app

Category Subgroup - Infra tools

(project) Ansible playbooks

Another example of GitLab as a company would be the following:

Organization Group - GitLab

Category Subgroup - Marketing

(project) Design

(project) General

Category Subgroup - Software

(project) GitLab CE

(project) GitLab EE

(project) Omnibus GitLab

(project) GitLab Runner

(project) GitLab Pages daemon

Category Subgroup - Infra tools

(project) Chef cookbooks

Category Subgroup - Executive team

The maximum nested groups a group can have, including the first one in the
hierarchy, is 21.

Things like transferring or importing a project inside nested groups, work like
when performing these actions the traditional way with the group/project
structure.

Creating a subgroup

NOTE: Note:
You need to be an Owner of a group in order to be able to create a subgroup. For
more information check the permissions table.
For a list of words that are not allowed to be used as group names see the
reserved names.
Users can always create subgroups if they are explicitly added as an Owner to
a parent group even if group creation is disabled by an administrator in their
settings.

To create a subgroup:

In the group's dashboard expand the New project split button, select
New subgroup and click the New subgroup button.

Create a new group like you would normally do. Notice that the parent group
namespace is fixed under Group path. The visibility level can differ from
the parent group.

Click the Create group button and you will be taken to the new group's
dashboard page.

Follow the same process to create any subsequent groups.

Membership

When you add a member to a subgroup, they inherit the membership and permission
level from the parent group. This model allows access to nested groups if you
have membership in one of its parents.

The group permissions for a member can be changed only by Owners and only on
the Members page of the group the member was added.

You can tell if a member has inherited the permissions from a parent group by
looking at the group's Members page.

From the image above, we can deduct the following things:

There are 5 members that have access to the group four

User0 is a Reporter and has inherited their permissions from group one
which is above the hierarchy of group four

User1 is a Developer and has inherited their permissions from group
one/two which is above the hierarchy of group four

User2 is a Developer and has inherited their permissions from group
one/two/three which is above the hierarchy of group four

For User3 there is no indication of a parent group, therefore they belong to
group four, the one we're inspecting

Administrator is the Owner and member of all subgroups and for that reason,
same as User3, there is no indication of an ancestor group

Overriding the ancestor group membership

NOTE: Note:
You need to be an Owner of a group in order to be able to add members to it.

NOTE: Note:
A user's permissions in a subgroup cannot be lower than in any of its ancestor groups.
Therefore, you cannot reduce a user's permissions in a subgroup with respect to its ancestor groups.

To override a user's membership of an ancestor group (the first group they were
added to), add the user to the new subgroup again with a higher set of permissions.

For example, if User0 was first added to group group-1/group-1-1 with Developer
permissions, then they will inherit those permissions in every other subgroup
of group-1/group-1-1. To give them Maintainer access to group-1/group-1-1/group1-1-1,
you would add them again in that group as Maintainer. Removing them from that group,
the permissions will fallback to those of the ancestor group.

Mentioning subgroups

Mentioning groups (@group) in issues, commits and merge requests, would
notify all members of that group. Now with subgroups, there is a more granular
support if you want to split your group's structure. Mentioning works as before
and you can choose the group of people to be notified.

Limitations

Here's a list of what you can't do with subgroups:

GitLab Pages are not currently working for
projects hosted under a subgroup. That means that only projects hosted under
the first parent group will work.

Group level labels don't work in subgroups / sub projects

It is not possible to share a project with a group that's an ancestor of
the group the project is in. That means you can only share as you walk down
the hierarchy. For example, group/subgroup01/projectcannot be shared
with group, but can be shared with group/subgroup02 or
group/subgroup01/subgroup03.